Alcohol consumption and risks of more than 200 diseases in Chinese men
Authors: Pek Kei Im, Neil Wright, Ling Yang, Ka Hung Chan, Yiping Chen, Yu Guo, Huaidong Du, Xiaoming Yang, Daniel Avery, Shaojie Wang, Canqing Yu, Jun Lv, Robert Clarke, Junshi Chen, Rory Collins, Robin G. Walters, Richard Peto, Liming Li, Zhengming Chen, Iona Y. Millwood, Chen Wang, Maxim Barnard, Derrick Bennett, Ruth Boxall, Johnathan Clarke, Ahmed Edris Mohamed, Hannah Fry, Simon Gilbert, Andri Iona, Maria Kakkoura, Christiana Kartsonaki, Hubert Lam, Kuang Lin, James Liu, Mohsen Mazidi, Sam Morris, Qunhua Nie, Alfred Pozarickij, Paul Ryder, Saredo Said, Dan Schmidt, Becky Stevens, Iain Turnbull, Baihan Wang, Lin Wang, Pang Yao, Xiao Han, Can Hou, Qingmei Xia, Chao Liu, Pei Pei, Dianjianyi Sun, Naying Chen, Duo Liu, Zhenzhu Tang, Ningyu Chen, Qilian Jiang, Jian Lan, Mingqiang Li, Yun Liu, Fanwen Meng, Jinhuai Meng, Rong Pan, Yulu Qin, Ping Wang, Sisi Wang, Liuping Wei, Liyuan Zhou, Caixia Dong, Pengfei Ge, Xiaolan Ren, Zhongxiao Li, Enke Mao, Tao Wang, Hui Zhang, Xi Zhang, Jinyan Chen, Ximin Hu, Xiaohuan Wang, Zhendong Guo, Huimei Li, Yilei Li, Min Weng, Shukuan Wu, Shichun Yan, Mingyuan Zou, Xue Zhou, Ziyan Guo, Quan Kang, Yanjie Li, Bo Yu, Qinai Xu, Liang Chang, Lei Fan, Shixian Feng, Ding Zhang, Gang Zhou, Yulian Gao, Tianyou He, Pan He, Chen Hu, Huarong Sun, Xukui Zhang, Biyun Chen, Zhongxi Fu, Yuelong Huang, Huilin Liu, Qiaohua Xu, Li Yin, Huajun Long, Xin Xu, Hao Zhang, Libo Zhang, Jian Su, Ran Tao, Ming Wu, Jie Yang, Jinyi Zhou, Yonglin Zhou, Yihe Hu, Yujie Hua, Jianrong Jin, Fang Liu, Jingchao Liu, Yan Lu, Liangcai Ma, Aiyu Tang, Jun Zhang, Liang Cheng, Ranran Du, Ruqin Gao, Feifei Li, Shanpeng Li, Yongmei Liu, Feng Ning, Zengchang Pang, Xiaohui Sun, Xiaocao Tian, Yaoming Zhai, Hua Zhang, Wei Hou, Silu Lv, Junzheng Wang, Xiaofang Chen, Xianping Wu, Ningmei Zhang, Xiaoyu Chang, Xiaofang Chen, Jianguo Li, Jiaqiu Liu, Guojin Luo, Qiang Sun, Xunfu Zhong, Weiwei Gong, Ruying Hu, Hao Wang, Meng Wang, Min Yu, Lingli Chen, Qijun Gu, Dongxia Pan, Chunmei Wang, Kaixu Xie, Xiaoyi Zhang
Journal: Nature Medicine (2023)

Abstract Alcohol consumption accounts for ~3 million annual deaths worldwide, but uncertainty persists about its relationships with many diseases. We investigated the associations of alcohol consumption with 207 diseases in the 12-year China Kadoorie Biobank of &gt;512,000 adults (41% men), including 168,050 genotyped for ALDH2 - rs671 and ADH1B - rs1229984 , with &gt;1.1 million ICD-10 coded hospitalized events. At baseline, 33% of men drank alcohol regularly. Among men, alcohol intake was positively associated with 61 diseases, including 33 not defined by the World Health Organization as alcohol-related, such as cataract ( n = 2,028; hazard ratio 1.21; 95% confidence interval 1.09–1.33, per 280 g per week) and gout ( n = 402; 1.57, 1.33–1.86). Genotype-predicted mean alcohol intake was positively associated with established ( n = 28,564; 1.14, 1.09–1.20) and new alcohol-associated ( n = 16,138; 1.06, 1.01–1.12) diseases, and with specific diseases such as liver cirrhosis ( n = 499; 2.30, 1.58–3.35), stroke ( n = 12,176; 1.38, 1.27–1.49) and gout ( n = 338; 2.33, 1.49–3.62), but not ischemic heart disease ( n = 8,408; 1.04, 0.94–1.14). Among women, 2% drank alcohol resulting in low power to assess associations of self-reported alcohol intake with disease risks, but genetic findings in women suggested the excess male risks were not due to pleiotropic genotypic effects. Among Chinese men, alcohol consumption increased multiple disease risks, highlighting the need to strengthen preventive measures to reduce alcohol intake.